Last year, in an interview with The Quietus, Moscow's Moa Pillar (Fedor Pereverzev) was asked about his relationship to contemporary minimalism and its exponents.

He replied, in a telling few sentences: "I love their approaches, and among those composers you'd certainly find a lot of my favorite artists. Nonetheless, Moa Pillar is more like a wildfire, whereas for those people... music is more like a safe harbor. I certainly adore that safety, but in practice the universe keeps telling me something different. It tells me: 'If you insist on doing things safely, then fine – be happy with that. But that's not what you're here for – and I won't help you [with anything cautious]. If, on the other hand, you do what you really should... then excellent!' That's a joke, of course... albeit with a grain of truth."

Several important themes emerge here, topics of lasting importance in Moa Pillar's discography. Firstly, minimalism is related both to constraint and wariness. Insight comes from excess – from too much and its obligatory failure(s), in service of the new.

Secondly, any agency in search of that same truth is reduced over time. The closer one is to plenitude, the less relevant one becomes. Proximity to everything requires an unrelenting reduction to (almost) nothing. And let's not forget that Moa Pillar continues to work closely with the Petrozavodsk label, Full of Nothing. He even speaks of his alter-ego - of his single moniker - as a process, not a state. It knows no secure, static harbor. And that's a good thing.

In a snapshot of the new album, The Calvert Journal correctly notes that "the relationship between sound and space has always been crucial for Pereverzev: [because] he grew up between the buzzing metropolis of Moscow and Russia’s vast, tranquil countryside. [Consequently], the music he composes tends to be [both] grand and intimate at the same time. A sensation of limitless space can suddenly open up in a tiny club basement; the collision of galaxies trickles down [amid] the chimes of some unknown esoteric temple."

An unabashedly youthful and maximalist register suits the work of a young man intent on making revelatory mistakes beyond familiarity and manageable dimensions.

And so we have "Hymns," underwritten by the nameless, timeless scale of epiphany – by the grandeur of that which is simultaneously ineffable and intangible. The most canonical and conservative form of human song is used to peak beyond itself. Restraint ponders its lack; finitude considers its eternal irrelevance. Hence, no doubt, the equally epic and ironic artwork for "Hymns" - framing some magnificently anxious techno.